Disclaimer: Use at your own risk. I don’t work for Funcom and neither I nor Funcom can be held responsible if anything goes wrong. If you don’t know what you’re doing and/or don’t understand what I’m talking about, skip this one or ask a friend to help.
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With that out of the way:
SWL stores most of its game data in a so-called Resource Database (RDB), stored in a number of 1 GB files. Over time, this database can become bloated with orphaned or corrupted data, especially if you’ve ever used the patcher’s built-in repair functionality, or patched your game from classic TSW to SWL.
The repair feature is especially deceptive as it doesn’t actually seem to repair or replace bad data, but rather appends the good data while leaving the corrupted data in place. So every time you use it, your RDB grows by the size of the re-downloaded data.
When the topic came up on discord, some users reported RDB folders more than twice the normal size while many others had several GB worth of junk.
If you want to check the size of your game’s Resource Database, simply open the game folder (on Windows 10 this can easily be done by right clicking on the SWL shortcut and selecting “Open file location”), and navigate to the “RDB” folder below it.
A clean and healthy RDB should be in the 33 to 36 GB range. If yours is significantly larger than that, you should consider starting over with a fresh download. You don’t have to reinstall the entire game for that, but it is a significant download. Keep that in mind when using capped, throttled or metered internet connections.
If you find that your RDB folder shows significant bloat, the solution is simple: Close down the game, delete the entire contents of the folder and restart the patcher. Make sure that the “Full Client” bundle is checked in Options. This will kick off an initial, clean download of the RDB. The download itself clocks in at around 18 GB which after decompression results in a fresh RDB of roughly 33 GB.
After the initial “Full Client” download, there’s still an additional background download of roughly 3 GB. This data will be downloaded gradually over time, usually when you zone into a “new” area for the first time after a fresh download. To speed up that process, you can increase the Background Download Speed in your patcher options. Depending on your connection speed, this can noticeably increase your loading times for the first few days after a fresh RDB download.
I hope someone out there finds this wall of text useful. If you did, I’d be curious to know how bloated your RDB was before cleanup. Mine clocked in at over 46 GB, but users on discord have already reported numbers twice that high.
